Viewing profile — billforsternz

What is it about a country that makes it "irrelevant" in your opinion?

Lots of people call it that. The Australian national team are called the Socceroos. The best, most authoritative magazine about the sport is called "World Soccer", published in the…

Soccer is a legitimate name for the sport. Football is properly the name of a whole group of sports OR in a local context the locally most popular type of football. It's very weird…

My problem is I don't want to be first to recline, if the person behind me reclines, fine.

(Not the person you're asking, but...) I don't want to adversely affect the person behind me, but I also accept the right of the person in front of me to recline if they want to. I…

Stuck it out to the end against my better judgement. Got 89/100 due to difficulties at the "Grandmaster" stage (12/20). I thought it was going to be tougher because the very first …

The Z80 does have a DAA (decimal adjust arithmetic) instruction to facilitate BCD arithmetic. I don't think I ever used it in my Z80 years and I'm not familiar with the details. Sa…

The wording is very unambiguous, it means something very specific in chess. In every legal chess position either White is checkmated or Black is checkmated or (by far the most comm…

I is tab ('\x09' or '\t') and J is new line ('\x0a' or '\n'). These Ctrl combinations follow a predictable linear mapping to the control character section of the ASCII table. Basic…

Thanks for clarifying. I think this is an ARM and a break from a history of Z80 and Z80 adjacent CPUs. I do get the impression TI have done a good (financial) job milking these pro…

Surprisingly high or surprisingly low?

Yes. And in the second one he has return c; when he meant return b; Homer nods.

We're both seeing rudeness. We both dislike rudeness. I think it's rude to rain on someone's parade. You think it's rude to assume someone hadn't thought through their comment (I b…

I wasn't really appealing to authority. I was just suspecting a familiar pattern that I always find a little distasteful. Person A describes a brilliant idea they're obviously prou…

How long did you think about this before making this declaration? How long did Walter Bright think about this before making his decision when designing his language? Not saying you…

Sir Edmund Hillary and his team drove early Massey-Fergussons to the South Pole in 1958 (much to the annoyance of Sir Vivian Fuchs who Hillary beat to the pole even though Hillary …

Back in the early 1980s I leveled up my self taught Z80 assembly skills by reading a book that attempted to disassemble and explain the Sinclair Spectrum ROM. I remember the very f…

I would prefer avoiding the infinite loop and printing a message to help the user understand what went wrong. I'm sure you could do that with an extra 100 bytes or so. Just my opin…

I remember Joel of Joel on Software publicly working through the process of creating a remote desktop for normals type product called Copilot back in the day. If I remember correct…

We should probably be grateful Microsoft didn't name it .NET

By convention if it was 13.600 they would present it as 13.600 not 13.6. If I remember correctly Everest was first surveyed as 29000 feet tall and they changed it arbitrarily to 29…

386 grams, the extra 0.2 grams is not only irrelevant it's non existent because the process of converting from one measurement standard to another never increases the precision of …

C dev wasn't a problem with MSDOS and 640K either. With CP/M and 64K it was a challenge I think. Struggling to remember the details on that and too lazy to research it right now.

The almost regretful "I'm not Norwegian" clarification here is charming.

I thought my Z80 project ( https://github.com/billforsternz/retro-sargon ) was close to the whimsical end of the practical to just for fun spectrum but this takes things to a whole…